Workshop Hell & How to Get Out of It

At this point, I’ve spent nearly half my life in workshop—first as a student, and now as a teacher. By far the most surprising thing I’ve learned is how repetitive workshops are. Especially when one is stuck teaching at the introductory level, it becomes obvious that human beings—at least those drawn to creative writing workshops—have a lot fewer than seven stories to tell. Though you might expect each workshop to be different, an assumption based on the expected creativity of the different people involved in each one, the truth is that you often see just a small handful of themes and plots over and over. How do you avoid falling in with the same old, same old? How do you attempt, for the umpteenth time, to address these tired opening moves? That is the subject I intend to tackle in a series of posts, one tired piece at a time.

The trick, I propose, is understanding the roots of the appeal these typical pieces have. I say pieces consciously, because whether prose (fiction or not) or poetry, these themes and plots have a way of dominating the beginner’s efforts. But, why? Why do beginners gravitate toward these typical pieces? Understanding their appeal is the first step in becoming a fresher writer.

Next, the beginner needs to attempt to transcend the typical in some way. One way of doing this is to turn the typical on its head—once you understand what it is that you’re trying to get at, where the appeal is, you can twist the typical around and approach the piece in a fresher way. I will try to offer examples of these twists on the typical as much as possible, but, for now, abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

The First Circle: The Break-up Story

Alas, one of the first stories every student attempts to write is The Great Love Story. Knowing full well that such stories are hackneyed, the beginner thinks it would be a fine idea to avoid the happy ending and provide us with a sad one, showing us how the protagonist lost his or her innocence.

Yikes. Ending in a break-up instead of a wedding is hardly that twist I was referring to—we are still deeply entrenched in the realm of cliché here. Ah, the relationship didn’t turn out the way the protagonist expected. The beloved turned out to be shallow, or betrayed you, or perhaps you had to choose the uglier girl or boy instead, or move to Australia at the end of the summer. Whatever. Bo-rrring!

We all know love ain’t what it’s cracked up to be, so why persist in writing the break-up story? Well, at its root such a story taps into a universal coming-of-age experience, and the beginning writer wants to partake of the eternal theme. It can be done well—two stories I teach consistently on this theme are “Araby” by James Joyce and “A&P” by John Updike. Both stories have the same crush-meets-disappointment coming-of-age theme, but the way these master writers approach it makes all the difference. For one thing, both stories are more than love stories—they are both biting social commentary. “Araby” is an extended meditation on the narrator’s bleak existence on dead-end North Richmond Street, with his old books and his drunken uncle, and the specter of British rule adding a political dimension to the story. “A&P” is an equally bleak look at a suburban beach town and its petit bourgeois values. The number one problem with the beginner’s love story is that there is usually little to no setting or context outside the personal. The setting is usually Generic High School X, and the lovers are suspended from contact with the outside world. Minor characters might include the Best Friend or The Ex, but other than that the theme lacks complexity. You can’t tell a “coming of age” story like that. One doesn’t come of age in a vacuum—on the contrary, the true coming-of-age story is really about the child becoming part of the world such as it is in all its harsh reality, be it a go-nowhere Irish town or a suburban supermarket where the people have all the uniqueness of sheep. The beloved is just a vehicle concentrating all the shit that’s about to hit the fan.

So what’s the beginning writer to do? Well, you can try to provide that context for your love story. Realize that the love story is symbolic—not the main show. The main show is something else—the world and its discontents that the protagonist is about to deal with. Avoid the star-crossed lovers context, however. Been there, so done that. Whether set in Verona, the West Side, LA, or Hawaii, the opposite-tracks theme is so overdone that it will actually make your love story even more hackneyed. Keep both lovers from the same side.

Another, maybe easier way is to put an embarrassing sex scene in the middle of your story. Another problem with the bare-bones love story is how little recognition sex receives as a factor. Of course all love stories are ultimately about sex. Yet, the badly written coming-of-age story is so invested in romance that it often bypasses the question of sex altogether. The realization or epiphany involved in the resolution is something emotional, like realizing the ultimate boyfriend is also ultimately a cheat. We can pick up this kind of entry-level wisdom from watching Lifetime, however—hardly a coming-of-age. Sex, on the other hand, is rarely accurately depicted in art, and can really push the coming-of-age story to the next level if done well. The uninitiated rarely understand how catastrophic sex can be, and a great sexual catastrophe in the middle of your love story can inject realism and even a little bit of humor—always welcome—into an otherwise vapid story. One of my favorites is in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Protagonist Esther Greenwood hemorrhages violently after her first sexual experience. Great! Another favorite is Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Protagonist Connie is all about the fuzzy romance she hears in songs, leading to a truly frightening encounter with Arnold Friend, a Big-Bad-Wolf type who blows her little romantic house in.

Yes.

Another great example of this theme is Little Darlings. Fifteen-year-olds at summer camp take bets to see which of the two protagonists loses her virginity first. As their targets, one girl picks a sexy, older counselor, and the other a boy from the camp across the lake. Of course, the girl who picks the counselor has no shot at winning, yet she pretends to have sex with him and wins the bet when the other girl—who, of course, did have sex—pretends not to. It’s a wonderful, wonderful coming-of-age story, because both girls start out equally innocent and the one who actually loses her virginity also loses her ability to talk about it.



Yes.

From more or less the same time period comes The Last American Virgin, a schizo little teen sex flick that nevertheless presents a really interesting look at teen boy sexuality. It’s schizo because it’s trying really hard to be Porky’s, but the heart of the plot is solid. Gary and his friends are all dying to have sex, but Gary is the only one interested in love, particularly Karen’s love. He also wants to fit in, however, and winds up losing his virginity to a streetwalker he and his friends pool funds to hire. The scene is so disgusting, however, that it really shocks you into the realization that all these sexcapades are crass and horrible, and have nothing to do with the kind of feelings Gary has for Karen, who winds up preferring his best friend anyway, even after he knocks her up and refuses to help her deal with it. It’s a brutal awakening, which is the best kind.

Recognize the role of sex in the coming-of-age love story, and it’ll at least take it out of the romance rut. Make it graphic. Lose the erection, ejaculate prematurely on her thigh, fart accidentally. Anything bodily will do—anything that goes against the moonlight and roses garbage. Anything except the broken condom, which is also a cliché. Condom drama is not very good a) because it’s overdone and b) because then we can always blame the condom for screwing things up, when what you really want is the people screwing up, showing their humanity in its full bodily horror.

No.

My apologies, by the way, for all the dated examples. I was pretty innocent myself when I read and watched the stories I’ve mentioned here, and one thing that happens after you actually come of age is that you’re not really drawn to this type of story anymore. I need a lot of convincing at this point before I can be talked into giving my precious time to a novel or a film that I think is going to be predictable. What’s the point? Last time I caved it was to No Strings Attached, a Natalie Portman, Ashton Kutcher abomination. Hm. Yes, these sex-starved youths agree it’s best to get together just to have the good sex they crave, and nothing more. Lo and behold, they wind up falling in love! Like, duh. Man, I saw that whole movie in the second it took to read the title. What was the point of devoting two whole hours to seeing it play out? Kutcher’s not that cute. Apparently there’s another one called Friends with Benefits, and surely 1,000 more. Maybe one of these is a more current example of an old story told with a good twist, but I’m not willing to sit through the other 999 just to be able to provide fresher examples for you people. I was ten when I first saw The Last American Virgin. I was titillated by the title; being a virgin myself, I was curious to see anything that could inform me about this great mystery. Lucky for me, I wound up seeing a great film that I couldn’t really understand at the time. The first time I saw it as an adult I thought, wow. Were it in the theaters now, however, I would probably dismiss it as another stupid sex comedy.

See where I’m going with this? You don’t want that to happen to your story. You want to stand out from the pack. I hope I’ve given you two good ways to do that with your love story: create a strong social setting for which the love story becomes a frontispiece, and recognize the role of sex, in all its gross bodily reality, in the romance plot. And tune in next post for the next circle of Hell.

Top Mistakes Beginning Writers Make, Part II

Welcome back! It’s all about second acts in this second year of Writing with Celia, and so my first real post of the new year is a part II. If you missed part I, well, go and read it! Otherwise, proceed below, with the second half of typical beginners’ booboos.
 

A great book for
learning how to
read critically.

1.     Not reading critically. Many of the faux pas committed by beginning writers are directly attributable to poor reading habits. Even if you spend the rest of your life in workshop, you will never learn a single thing about writing if you don’t read voraciously—and well. Here, I’m not going to rant again about the need to read in order to learn to write. I believe I’ve made that point! But I do want to emphasize the need to not only read well, meaning good books written by good writers who can help you grow, but also to read critically. Why is this book so satisfying, but not that? Very often, the beginning writer reads for pleasure, puts the book down with a smile or a grimace, and grabs the next. Both books you enjoyed and those you didn’t can help you grow as a writer if you learn to analyze your reactions and how they came about. In order to do this easily and well, it helps to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of literary criticism. That’s why the best writing programs are those that have a strong literature studies program attached to them. You can reproduce this effect on your own, however. Buy a typical college reader and study on your own, for example. A book club can also help you analyze why good books are good and bad ones bad by forcing you to not only analyze your own reactions, but discuss them with others. Just make sure your book club has good readers in it who will also be capable of analysis. Finally, keeping a reading journal is also an excellent way of paying attention to the nuts and bolts. Every time you read, grab your journal and explain to yourself why you enjoyed / didn’t enjoy what you just read.

2.     No sense of experimentation. Only the bravest of beginning writers are willing to go out on a limb, but usually even those people can’t quite figure out what it means to do that, and so beginners’ writing is usually very safe (read: dull). You grow, however, by taking risks. You don’t always have to tell the story in past tense, third person omniscient, or first-person point of view that sounds like third-person omniscient for all the voice it has. You don’t have to tell it chronologically. Try it in present tense, try it from the point of view of the parrot, try it backwards. Try it a couple of different ways. Get freaky with it.

3.      Narcissistic point of view. The beginning writer often fails to realize that just because something is interesting to him or her, it doesn’t make it interesting to someone else. The drawn-out tale of the first breakup, for example, may make you weep as you write it, but it makes us gag or giggle, neither of which you meant for us to do. Why? You forgot about us. You were writing about yourself and for yourself, which is fine as long as you can make some kind of empathetic leap, as long as you can convey what is representative, human, and eternal about yourself. The moment you forget about us readers, however, you shut down your inner critic, and that makes for bad writing. There’s a school of writing instruction, a good one, that insists one writes what ones knows, and one of course knows oneself. But often this advice is taken to the extreme, and the writer becomes unable to discern the difference between writing for others and writing for therapy. This happens to be how so many beginners’ workshops are full of stories written from the point of view of children, which is so incredibly difficult to do well that it’s hardly a task for the beginner. But the writer is trying to work something out, like a parents’ divorce, or is so young that “writing about yourself” literally means writing from the point of view of a child. These stories are usually very predictable and boring, and, though they are attempts at “coming of age” narratives, they are not good ones, because there is no critical space between the narrated experience and its writing. “Writing for yourself” is okay only insofar as you think of yourself as an other, a critical doppelganger who shares your interests and experiences, but who is still someone else.

4.     Purposely derivative elements. This one’s baffling to me, but I see it all the time. Workshopping these pieces is a hoot: the workshop usually consists of a string of comments such as “this character reminds me of X” and “that part reminded me of Y” or “this story reminds me of . . . “—in short, the piece is nothing but a quilt of other people’s writing. The workshop always crumbles when someone brings up the obvious: are you enjoying this story, or the ones it’s reminding you of? It’s a devastating problem for the writer, who usually conceived of the elements purposely drawing them from other texts she or he has enjoyed. “I wanted to make this character sort of like X in Y,” she or he will say. Only, “sort of” is more like “exactly.” There’s nothing wrong with retelling stories, but you must make them yours in some way.

And now, some typical hurdles more specific to the poet:

5.     Excessive simple rhymes. Often, the beginning poet doesn’t quite know what poetry is apart from rhymed words, and so reaches for too many bad ones, paying no attention or too little to everything else that makes a poem a poem. The problem comes from unfamiliarity with anything remotely contemporary or literary when it comes to poetry. Song lyrics, children’s rhymes, and light verse (such as that found in greeting cards) all rely heavily on simple rhymes, but contemporary literary poetry is a completely different animal. Though rhyme exists is both formal and free verse, it must be controlled and fresh. You can’t Dr. Seuss your way into a poem, but, if the last time you actually read a poem was when you were seven years old, you’ll probably try to.

6.     Writing about feelings. The beginning poet confuses poetry with emotion. This is some kind of conspiracy perpetrated by Hallmark, no doubt. Outpourings of abstract emotion are no more poetry than your high school diary was. Even Dr. Seuss knows that poetry is about green eggs and ham: about stuff. Your poem must have things in it that we can see, hear, taste, smell, etc. If these things conjure up feelings in us, you’ve done your job. But telling us about the feelings you’ve had instead of the things that elicited them from you is like chewing our food for us, which is gross. Maxine Kumin, whom I once had the pleasure of studying with, always said poems are like rooms. We must fill them with furniture, and the reader will live in them. You can’t sit on love and rest your coffee cup on despair.

7.     Writing exclusively about love. The beginning poet also often thinks of poetry as exclusively love poetry, which is only a small subset of the whole thing. Poetry can be about anything, and some of my favorite poems are about dead animals and chapatti fried in ghee. Love poems, like stories told from the point of view of children, are actually extremely difficult to write well, and not for beginners. In fact, the beginner shouldn’t think of the poem as being “about” any particular emotion at all. Make it about something concrete, like the fence or the tomatoes or the sweaty socks.

Not sure if it's a
cliché? Look it
up!

8.     No awareness of cliché. Another problem that comes from not enough reading. The beginner actually thinks of the cliché as good. The lips are always like roses or cherries, the eyes always blue as the sky. If something hits them, it always does so like a ton of bricks. Cliché is the most insidious, disgusting weed in the garden of writing. Let just one in, and, like rabbits or tribbles, they’ll multiply and take over your writing until every sentence has one or more. The beginner’s problem is that she or he doesn’t recognize them as evil. They are familiar little easy phrases that are easy to grab. Learning to spot clichés and weed them out takes time and effort, like all good things do.

9.     No awareness of contemporary poetry. Kind of goes without saying at this point, but the problem of not reading is even worse when it comes to poetry. Decent enough prose will come at you sideways sometimes—a great script, a great article you read in the doctor’s office. Contemporary poetry exists in an alternate universe, however, and you will never bump into it accidentally. If you don’t make the effort to learn who is writing today, and how, and why, all you’ll know of poetry is nursery rhymes and light verse, and the occasional classic or uplifting poem some poor teacher included in the syllabus one day when she was feeling hopeful. The range and dynamism of contemporary poetry is amazing. There are lyrical poets, confessional poets, experimental poets, formalists, spoken word artists. So much, all of it different. If you want to have fun at the party, you have to first find out where it is, and what it takes to get invited.

An excellent guide
to the elements of
contemporary poetry.

10.  No awareness of form. Apart from simple rhyme schemes, the beginning poet doesn’t know much about what kinds of decisions go into the way a poem looks. Beyond not being acquainted with traditional forms such as the sonnet or villanelle, the beginner often has no notion of the function of form in free verse. Why are some lines long, and others short? Why are some poems arranged into stanzas, and some not? What is the purpose of counting syllables? What the heck is scansion? These are all “mysteries” to the beginner, but bread and butter to the initiated. Form is what makes a poem a poem, not rhyme. Unfortunately, it’s not an easy thing to study, but that’s no excuse to ignore it. A poem isn’t a poem until the arrangement of words has a specific function.

Well, there you have it. I’m sure there’s more, but these are the issues that I encounter most frequently in my beginning courses. Seeing them all laid out like this is pretty daunting, but I find comfort in order, in cataloguing. Know thy enemy! It takes many, many years to move from these early problems to the next set, and many times even very experienced writers would do well to think in these basic ways once more. Start with one or two issues, practice, and move on to the next.

Top Mistakes Beginning Writers Make, Part I

It’s time to spruce up the syllabus for the new semester, and that means lots of thinking about the kind of students I’ll be teaching and what they need to learn. I teach an introductory course, so that means truly raw beginners—students who may never have attempted to write creatively before. Over the years, one comes to notice repeating struggles, and, since I’m into counting lately, I thought I’d compile a list of the top mistakes beginning writers make. At first I thought I’d distinguish between prose and poetry, but, as I compiled the list, I soon realized that there’s so much overlap that such a distinction would be misleading. So, what follows applies to all kind of writing, except for the few isolated only for poetry, and those only marginally.

1. Too much dialogue. Perhaps it’s the fact that we watch more movies than read books these days, and movies, as drama, rely on dialogue more than the short story or novel do, or at least seem to do so. In truth, movies that are too “talky” often bore people. My husband hated Before Sunrise, for example, because all Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy did was talk. I still love that movie, and even the sequel, Before Sunset. Great freaking dialogue, but also great characters and a great story, which is the point: the problem isn’t too much dialogue, but, rather, misusing dialogue to tell the story that would be better told through exposition, summary, or action. The beginning writer doesn’t quite know how to manipulate other elements of storytelling, and so relies on dialogue because it’s familiar; we all know how to talk, how to tell a story, and so you wind up with long passages of characters explaining things to one another, or—evil of all evils!—to him or herself. Page after page of dialogue is boring and weird, and makes for skimpy storytelling. Characters should speak only when they have something to say.

2. Not paying attention to pacing. An offshoot of the pages of dialogue problem, pacing is the secret forté of the professional and the bane of the beginner. The beginner starts at the beginning and continues to the end, usually without too much consideration for what deserves attention and what should be skipped over quickly or even entirely. The balancing act between scene (a detailed account of a particular moment) and summary (an express recap of long periods of time) can be one of the hardest writing skills to master, but it’s the secret between boring and exciting reading. Get to the good part, and, when you get there, take it slow.

3, No patience with the story (no development). Also related to pacing is the problem of scanty development. Beginning writers want to tell the story as quickly as possible, and, while there’s a place in this world for flash fiction, even for micro fiction, the question of good development has little to do with word count. You have to learn to give the story the room it needs to be told well, and, too often, the beginning writer tries to shove a novel into a postcard. Writing is a slow, complex process, and, if the only reason why your story is two pages long is because you “just wanted to get it over with,” you’re in the wrong business.

4. Flat characters. Characters are often the first to fall prey to the scanty development bug. This one is good, that one is bad, and we really don’t know why. “She’s a typical ‘hooker with the heart of gold,’” the beginner will say, as if that’s a good thing. Flat characters are clichés (hooker with the heart of gold) or circumstances (the boss), not people. You have to provide motivations for your characters. We need to know why the do the things they do, say the things they say, and think and feel the way they do. Not only does this take time and space, but thought. You can’t just grab a character off the shelf—you must create one.

5. Naïve understanding of life. Part of the problem of the beginning writer is that usually he or she is young. Scientists have actually studied the adolescent and post-adolescent brain and its capacity for complex moral development, and found that young people tend to think in absolutes—good versus evil, for example. A sign of maturity is the ability to see shades of gray. Thus, the beginning writer tends to punish the bad guy at the end of the story while rewarding the good guy, as in fairy tales. No one is either wholly good or wholly bad, of course, but experience must teach you this. Students rankle when I bring this up. Being in college is all about becoming an adult, and it hurts to be reminded in any way how new you are at that, especially when you feel so secretly inadequate in the first place. Some students also argue that they’ve “been through more” in their short lives than “most people have been through at forty” (meaning me, of course!). True. Some people have unfortunate beginnings—poverty, abuse, illness, and death affect people of all ages. The way we process these events, however, changes with time. About one out every three introductory course stories involves someone’s death, for example. As we grow older, however, we come to realize that death is not only natural and common, but, quite frankly, nothing to write about. Most young writers have difficulty understanding how little drama there is to death, illness, even abuse. They may be part of a good story, but not de facto a good story by themselves.

6. No sense of interior conflict. This list is coming out ike a braid; recognizing the role of interior conflict is the next step after realizing that “the death of X” is not de facto a good story. It’s how Y reacts to the death of X that can—maybe—make for a good story. The beginning writer’s world is all about exteriority. Planes crash, bags of money are found, lovers are unfaithful: things happen to the characters, but the characters don’t change in any way, just their exterior circumstances. The good guy may lose his business, be crippled in a car accident, and have his dog stolen by his ex-wife, but, in the end, he’s the same good guy he was at the beginning of the story! Watch any soap opera and observe. Most times, characters weep frantically, scream at one another, and tear things up (notice that these are all also exterior manifestations of interior turmoil) when things happen to them. However, they remain either good or evil despite these circumstances. Learning to write about our interior lives, those inner struggles under apparently normal circumstances that we all experience and that define us more than our exterior circumstances do, is one of the first breakthroughs a beginning writer can have.

7. Senseless plotting. The lack of interior conflict in the beginner’s story often means that there’s a lot going on outside, and some of it just doesn’t make sense. You need to end your story, for example, but, because all you’ve got is a series of circumstances with no connection to fully developed character psyches, your only recourse is some story-ending event. The wedding. The graduation. The death. Even worse, the winning lotto ticket, the alien abduction, or the meteor apocalypse. That’s one kind of senseless plotting, the traditional deus ex machina that ends the story by ending the world or other exterior circumstances. It’s senseless because we all know that weddings, graduations, deaths, jackpots, aliens, and meteors aren’t real endings, just arbitrary ones (well, maybe meteors . . .). A wedding, for example, may or may not be a satisfying ending, depending on the conflict that lead up to it. If the conflict was whether or not the fiancé is the right person, the wedding itself is hardly going to answer this question, since most likely we won’t know for a long time afterwards. Yet, many superficially plotted stories end this way, as if the ceremony could wipe out all previous conflicts (no doubt this is also the reason why there are so many divorces, but I digress).

But that relies on you having identified a conflict to begin with, and the problem with many beginners’ stories is that there is no clear conflict. Characters are just walking around, attending a party, for example, and there’s nothing at stake. There’s no tension moving you from one moment to the next, no quest. You don’t know how to end the story because you don’t know what the story is. We’re peeping in on some people doing some stuff, but there’s no theme, nothing. That’s not a story, that’s an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

8. Misidentifying the drama / Wasting time on bad material. All of which leads to perhaps the most common beginner’s problem, not recognizing where the story is. You write up to the death of X, the devasting breakup, or the big wedding, giving often meticulous attention to all the little events leading up to The Big Event. The first cough that should have sent X running to the doctor but didn’t, the first spat over dinner that foreshadows (beginners love foreshadowing—they learned it in AP English) The Divorce, the meeting of the lovers as they caught each other’s eyes across a crowded room (the room must always be crowded). To make things worse, the beginning writer begins the story with “The day my [or his/her] life changed forever began with . . . .” Zzzzzzzzzz. Not only is no one surprised by these familiar trajectories, but also there’s very little drama before any big event. This is very, very difficult for the beginning writer to accept, that a Big Event on down the line somewhere does not create automatic anticipation. In truth, the more interesting stories happen after: after the death, the breakup, the wedding. How do the characters adapt to their lives after a change? The Big Event might mark some exterior spot on the characters’ lives, but the real story is where the interior conflict is, and that can be anywhere in relation to an exterior event. The beginner writes over and over about garden weddings and rainy funerals, but there’s just nothing there. The story is elsewhere.

9. Vacuum settings. Related to the problem of excessive dialogue, stories set in a vacuum are extremely common. Beginning writers are impatient with setting, and so you have characters running around generic high schools or clubs or whatever, or, sometimes, nowhere at all. Before you roll your eyes and claim that descriptions of setting are boring, consider how interested you’d be in a radio play. Though there are some fantastic radio plays, the form was overshadowed by television for just one reason: we could see the people in the play. The only way for us to be able to see the people in your writing is if you put them somewhere. If you only describe what they look like without telling us where they are, all we’ve got is paper dolls. Put them in cars that drive down streets in specific cities, or on horses galloping down a beach, or, WTF, in the vacuum of space, as long as they’re in a spacesuit tethered to a spaceship full of buttons and light and the smell of the spacetoilet. Characters interact with their settings, and are a product of them. A girl and a boy on a date in LA will not behave the same as a girl and a boy on a date in NY. One couple will ride around in a car, the other take the subway. And that’s just a minor difference. Beginning writers don’t “see” very well, or smell, taste, and feel, for that matter. They have an overdeveloped sense of hearing—people talki ng, phones ringing, music playing, shots being fired, tires screeching. Imagine you are writing instructions to a filmmaker. What should the set look like? Where should the actors be?

10. No idea how to revise. Beyond making a few grammatical corrections, the impatience of the beginning writer is nowhere more evident than in the revision process. The beginning writer often believes that the best writing is spontaneously produced, if you have any talent, that is. That’s the first stumble right there, equating revision with lack of talent. The beginning writer also has a hard time realizing that writing is work. The word “creative” is no help, either. Creative things are supposed to be fun, aren’t they? So, if you have to “work” at something, you’re not good at it, either, not talented. So, the beginner is stuck in an endless stream of first drafts. Even when he or she begins to accept that revision may—after all—be somewhat normal and acceptable, the beginner has no idea how to go about it, how to a) identify the flaws in the writing, and b) address them successfully. The beginning writer is essentially lazy, and would rather ride the adrenaline rush of the first draft than plod through the swamp of revision.

Ah, the beginning writer, that fragile, enthusiastic puppy! You break my heart. Tune in next week for the second half of this post, where I’ll finish with the general psychology and take a look at that other mysterious creature, the Beginning Poet. Till then, wish me luck in syllabusland.

From Once upon a Time to Happily Ever After: Tips on Basic Plotting

Before you got all cutesy and experimental, you knew what a good plot was, although you may have simply called it “a good story.” You knew it began with “once upon a time,” and that after those words would come some people in some kind of trouble, like a princess stuck in a castle or an evil queen who abused her subjects. You knew that the next part of the story would involve a twist, some kind of event, that would affect this opening scenario, like meeting a wizard or finding a magical stone. You expected a villain, you expected drama, and, if you didn’t get it, you fell asleep or otherwise passed judgment. Finally, no matter what had happened, you expected a happy ending, usually involving people getting married and living “happily ever after.”

Aristotle laid down
the rules for good
plots all the way back
in 335 BC in the Poetics.

You knew about plot long before you knew about anything else involving storytelling. You knew that a good plot begins with a conflict (“once upon a time, a princess was trapped in a tower”), moves to a crisis (“one day, an ugly wizard suddenly appeared”), gets more exciting with each subsequent crisis (“the wizard could let her out, but he demanded her beauty in return”), achieves a climax (“the princess accepted the bargain!”), and ends with a resolution (“the ugly princess lived happily ever after, while the beautiful wizard was stuck in the tower forever”).

There are many variations on this basic plot structure, but every good story ever told follows it to some degree. There is the notion of reversal, for example, where, just when you think the conflict is about to be resolved, something unexpected happens that makes the situation even worse. The cops finally capture the murderer, and then it turns out it was somebody else who is getting away. There’s dramatic irony, where the reader knows more than the characters. Suzy is absentmindedly taking off her clothes, getting ready for bed, but you know the killer’s hiding in the closet! Run, Suzy! Plot is what creates tension. Stories that are referred to as “page-turners” are so because they are excellently plotted, because there is never a moment when you feel the absence of tension long enough to put the book down. You are compelled to keep reading to see what happens next. In longer works, such as novels, there might be mini-resolutions along the way, a moment when one conflict is resolved before another takes its place, usually at the chapter break. Overall, however, the tension is constant and building, as if climbing a mountain.

What it is important for you to understand beyond these basics is that there are good plots and bad plots, and that even a great plot all alone cannot carry a story.

One reason why a bad plot is bad is because it’s unbelievable in some way. What are the chances that the very person you needed to talk to that morning would be the one you would crash into on your way home from work? Never subordinate plot to your storytelling needs. I understand that you need your protagonist to find out that his wife is cheating on him, but does he have to find the compromising pictures mixed in with the bills? What kind of an idiot leaves compromising pictures just lying around like that? Ridiculous plot moments let the reader see the machinery of the story. It’s the writing equivalent of leaving the house with your underwear showing.

But maybe the cheating wife is an idiot. In that case, good for you! You are paying attention to the relationship between plot and characterization. Good plots don’t exist in a vacuum; they are good only insofar as they make sense given the characters involved. If your cheating wife is a normal person doing a sneaky thing, she would not leave her compromising pictures where her husband could easily find them. It would be out of character. If, however, you establish the fact that she’s absentminded, that she’s constantly locking her keys in the car and forgetting to take her birth control pill, we might be more willing to believe that she’s tossed the incriminating pics in with the water bill. In other words, you must provide a justification for the events that happen in your stories.

Exterior conflicts are usually a lot less satisfying to the educated reader than interior ones precisely because of the interplay between plot and characterization. Explosions and unclaimed bags of money are not de facto interesting—it’s the different ways different people react to them that capture our attention. Excessively plot-driven stories may give us an initial thrill, but they are quickly forgotten. Once you see the guy who fell out of the airplane land safely on a giant ball of cotton, you really don’t get the same effect the second time around. Interior conflicts, on the other hand, conflicts between good and evil and all the shades in between, between this decision and that one, human conflicts, are always more engaging, because they force us to confront our own fears and beliefs. The best plots are those where interior and exterior conflicts work together, where the character is plagued by doubts over what to do with the rest of her life, and so she does nothing. Lies around on the couch, keeps a blog nobody reads. Normally, these non-actions don’t look like a plot, but, in conjunction with a character’s interior conflict, they make a story.

Never resolve your story on one level and forget the other, however. The beginning writer often rushes to end the story via exterior conflict. You’re writing a love story, and it’s gotten messy. The couple’s broken up, and the one clearly in the wrong finally makes up her mind to seek the lover out and beg his forgiveness. Alas, at the very moment when she makes this decision, she sees on the news that there’s been a horrible accident . . . . Of course, it’s the beloved, and the reconciliation will never happen!

No.

You want chips
with that plot?

Apart from the pure queso of such a plot, the problem is that killing off a character does not address the story’s interior conflict. The problem here isn’t that these two people existed; it’s that they, for whatever reason, could not get along. Killing one of them off does not resolve their true problem, it just prevents it from being resolved. Such an “ending” is more than just corny, it’s the opposite of what an ending should be. Rather than feel a sense a resolution, the reader feels cheated. Would the offended lover have accepted the apology? Guess we’ll never know!

Always resolve your plots on the interior level first. Whatever dilemma your protagonists have been struggling with needs to be resolved in some way, and any exterior event that takes place at the same time can symbolize this resolution. Let’s go back to our broken couple: the one clearly in the wrong finally makes up her mind to seek the lover out and beg his forgiveness. On her way to meet him, she realizes she has spent the entirety of this relationship apologizing to this man. True, she’s a flirt, a ditz, she forgets to take her birth control pills and leaves incriminating photos with the water bill. But he’s so demanding, constantly pointing out her flaws, so hard to please. He won’t even let her eat pizza in peace, she remembers, taunting her about her fat thighs and what does she expect.

Instead of pulling into the driveway of his mother’s house, where he’s been staying, she keeps driving to the little pizza parlor down the road, and scarfs down a whole large pie, with extra cheese, all by herself.

A good ending.

It may seem that having pizza is a lot less “dramatic” than a big car crash where people die, but it is a better ending to this story because it addresses the protagonist’s interior conflict. She realizes—she has an epiphany—that she has been wrong, but not in the way she thought, and all her conflicts about how to keep this man just disappear. The conflict disappears—not the character. That is what gives the story its sense of resolution. A car crash is nothing but a deus ex machina, an artificial way of resolving conflict, like having a god step in.

Finally, also be aware that plots can be as cliché as language or characters. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, writer loses reader. You do not want been-there-done-that, nor some corny variation like boy meets girl, boy kills girl . . . . Ha ha ha, you are so clever. No. You will be drawn to a cliché plot if you are thinking about it apart from the other elements of your story, especially character. Don’t have a detailed plot laid out before you get to know your characters. Or, be prepared to tinker with the plot as your characters come alive. The best writing is organic—start with a premise, a conflict, a setting, some people. Put them in a little terrarium, see what happens. Let the story tell itself. Water it, fertilize it, prune it. Give it air and sunshine.

But most of all, don’t ignore it. We seem to have built some kind of chasm between “plot-driven” and “character-driven” writing, with plot-driven stories completely ignoring character and vice versa, and highbrow readers scoffing at plot as if it were solely a matter of bombs and car crashes and space invaders. The “serious” writers seem shy of any sort of event, with long, meandering, indeciferable stories where nothing happens. For me—call me retro, bourgeois, Ishmael—the best stories are those where plot and character are symbiotic. When I teach plot, I always use Updike’s “A&P.” No bombs, crashes, or cops here—just three girls walking through a supermarket in their bathing suits, and a boy whose life is changed by this small event. You can learn everything you will ever need to know about plot from this story. But chances are that you know most of what you need already: once upon a time, in walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits.

Cinderella’s Slipper Vs. Abraham Lincoln’s Hat, or Joan Rivers, Barbara Walters, & the Guinea Pig

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Of course not. To the writer, this is an easy question. The writer creates or sometimes recreates experience, which cannot occur without someone being there. You can have the richest setting ever written, the clearest, most compelling prose or poetry, and the most convoluted, original plot—if you don’t have good characters to pin them on, they will fall apart.

I use the term “characters” with some reservations, because what I am about to say applies to nonfiction as well. Even if you are writing about real people, you must find a way to recreate their reality for your readers in much the same way a fiction writer creates a character.

The most common problem for the beginning writer is overreliance on physical descriptions to do the job. When introducing a character or beginning a nonfiction piece, the beginner’s impulse is to always start with something akin to a police report. For some reason, physical details like the color, texture, and length of a character’s hair seem crucial, as do the color of eyes and the kind of clothing.

True, we live in a superficial culture here in the US (probably most other places, too). We put much stock in what people look like and what they wear. Look at all the fashion advice concerning what to wear to a job interview or first date. Look at all the red-carpet coverage.

But if your character isn’t going to a job interview, first date, or red-carpet event, this stuff is meaningless. Fiery red hair and piercing blue eyes aren’t character traits—they’re clichés. Some physical descriptions can be useful. For example, Jo’s long hair and Amy’s nose in Little Women are not just mindless physical traits. Jo’s hair reveals the femininity in the tomboy, and becomes a defining moment for her when she cuts it off for money. Amy’s struggles to have what she thinks of as a refined nose show her “airs.” The difference between a useless physical description and a useful one, as my word choice indicates, is that useful ones do some kind of work to reveal character or perhaps to create a plot point, like Cinderella’s slipper.

But how will a reader be able to imagine a character if you don’t provide a physical description?

That is the wrong question. The right question is whether the reader needs to imagine a particular physical appearance at all. Does it matter whether the reader is envisioning a blond or a brunette? Does it change the nature of the character or the meaning of the events you are narrating? Probably not. One of the most well-drawn characters in literature is the narrator of James Joyce’s “Araby,” and we don’t even know his name. We don’t stop to think what his hair color might be or what he’s wearing, because we know him in a much more intimate way: we hear his thoughts.

But what if you are writing about a real person? Don’t you owe the readers a physical description? Sure. There’s a natural curiosity about what real people look like that you should satisfy if possible. But don’t overdo it, and don’t let it substitute for more revealing information. Chances are, if you’re writing about a famous person, I probably have an idea of what he looks like. Do you really have to tell me about Abraham Lincoln’s hat? I think not. Don’t even tell me about your Aunt Rosie’s missing third finger unless it defines her in some way—it explains her shyness or, conversely, why she became a pianist. Joan Rivers has been giving us the minutest details of what celebrities wear for decades, and we are no closer to knowing any of them for it.

The would-be costume designers among you are incensed. It’s a good thing to think about your writing cinematically; it helps you flesh out setting and specific action. But the demands of film and print are not the same. Actors on a screen (or a stage) must be wearing something, or else be naked. And so, the good costume designer chooses something that makes sense. That works in conjunction with a particular character, time, and place. Even in the most spectacular cases of costume design, the costumes alone don’t make the character. It’s hard to imagine a film as visually striking as My Fair Lady without Cecil Beaton’s gorgeous outfits, but it’s the conjunction of the dresses with Audrey Hepburn’s dramatic personality makeover that create the character of Eliza Doolittle.

In print, however, there are no naked actors walking around (unless you put them there). We can omit physical descriptions and not even miss them. In fact, an irrelevant physical description is as distracting in print as a voice over is on film. There is a tendency now to constantly refer to Gucci this and Prada that. In some cases this is fitting. There is a culture to which designer labels are as endemic as mosquitoes and palm trees are to Florida. Lauren Weisberger could not have written The Devil Wears Prada without the specialized language of fashion. But all this name-dropping eventually starts to sound like product placement. Unless you’re writing for Vogue or someone’s paying you to sneak their brand into your story, don’t succumb to the temptation to show that you know the difference between Manolo Blahniks and Jimmy Choos.

So how do you create character?

The Barbara Walters Method

There’s a reason why Barbara Walters interviews people in their homes. It’s also why you snoop around the boyfriend’s apartment the first time you are over. Drawers full of lacy lingerie, empty cupboards, and miles of shelves displaying mint-in-box action figures from the 80’s are more than just setting. They’re character clues.

One of the most memorable characters I’ve ever encountered is Horse Badorties, from William Kotzwinkle’s The Fan Man. There are many reasons why this quirky character is so memorable, not the least of which is Kotzwinkle’s use of the first person. Horse’s voice is so unique it stays with you long after you finish the short novel. But we get to know Horse—from page one—by getting to know his pad, man, his

piled-up-to-the-ceiling-with-junk pad. Piled with sheet music, piled with garbage bags bursting with rubbish, piled with unnameable flecks of putrified wretchedness in grease.

It’s not just that his “pad” is messy; it’s the way he reacts to it that is so telling:

It’s the sink, man. I have found the sink. Wait a second, man . . . it is not the sink but my Horse Badorties easy chair piled with dirty dishes. I must sit down here and rest, man, I’m so tired from getting out of bed. Throw dishes onto the floor, crash break shatter. Sink down into the damp cushions, some kind of fungus on the armrest, possibility of smoking it.

Far from being shocked or upset by his mess, or even, as so many messy people are, oblivious to it, Horse enjoys the surprises his pad offers, and the possibility of smoking them. We know immediately the sort of person this guy is.

You don’t have to stick to people’s homes. Someone’s car, a desk at work, even the spot they choose to sit in a classroom can reveal character. The interaction between people and places is one of the most versatile tools at your disposal for showing character. Which brings me to my next point.

The Guinea Pig Method

People react not only to places, but to events. There’s an old writing myth I don’t think anyone’s been able to confirm about the existence of something called a “plot wheel.” Mystery writers would spin this wheel, and wherever the pointer landed, the event written there would be the next plot point. Sort of like the old board game Life: get married, win the lottery, switch careers, that sort of thing.

This is the wrong idea about how to create a good plot, but it does have its uses. People’s true natures come out when faced with an unexpected event. The event doesn’t even have to be catastrophic: think of Mr. Smooth on the perfect date, all good manners and pulling out chairs, holding doors open. Then give him a flat tire and watch him turn into a sweaty, cursing mess who berates his date for living on Pothole Place. Aha, we say. In the case of nonfiction, look for similar defining events. Sometimes these events are obvious—to go back to Abraham Lincoln, it’s as difficult to imagine him without the Civil War as without his hat. But defining events can also be the summer vacation that turned into a lifetime’s work in marine biology, or the childhood move to a different city that turned into a reading habit.

Always have your characters doing something. This is where your cinematic imagination will do you good—not by helping you envision what your characters are wearing, but what they are doing. The incessant doodler, the guy with his chair tipped back and his head resting on the windowsill, and the girl in the front row taking copious notes in tiny handwriting are all attending class, but each is different. This kind of detail-oriented action is more subtle than event reaction, but it can add personality as long as you don’t go overboard. If your character is jingling his keys, whistling a tune, and scratching his head, he might be having a seizure.

Perhaps the best kind of action is interior action, especially when it contrasts with exterior action. I used this contrast all through “Mesh and Lace,” a story about a waitress facing her ten-year high-school reunion. Most of what happens in that story stays inside the main character’s head. Outside, she’s waiting tables, dealing with her family, and having normal, banal conversations, but inside she’s questioning her whole life. Here is a scene that will hopefully make the point. Isabel, the main character, has still not decided whether she wants to go to the reunion when she finds out she will have to work that night:

“Isabel,” she says, as I walk up the driveway, “you’ve got to do me a favor. My brother in Jersey is getting married next next-weekend and I need you to do Saturday night—will you?”

I get a little pang somehow. It’s the night of the reunion. “Can’t Cary do it?”

“Cary’s already working on Saturday night.”

I really can’t say no to Sarah. How do you say no to someone who takes care of three kids she’s not even related to for three hours, five days a week? “Okay,” I say.

“Okay,” is all she says to Sarah, who is her coworker, neighbor, and sitter, and it seems—from the outside—that she’s not bothered at all by this development. Her thoughts, however, not only indicate an ambiguity that she’s not fully aware of, but also show her character: uncertain, somewhat afraid to look too deeply into her own feelings, but yet ready to do her job without hesitation. It’s the push-and-pull between Isabel’s exterior circumstances and her interior struggle that helped me develop this idea.

There are many other ways of putting round people on a flat page, but these two—setting and action—always work. Another classic way of capturing someone’s personality is through dialogue. That’s great if you can pull it off, but not many people can. Unless your character is witty or sarcastic, it’s difficult to reveal character through dialogue. It’s also difficult and potentially offensive to write dialect, which is a very popular way of making people sound like they belong to a particular ethnic group or region, or to show they are under or over educated. Stephen King loves it, and recommends it in his otherwise very good book on craft, On Writing. Here is the scene he holds up as an example:

“I don’t know what they say,” Mistuh Butts replied. “I ain’t never studied what thisun or thatun says, because eachun says a different thing until your head is finally achin and you lose your aminite.”

“What’s aminite?” the boy asked.

The boy in this scene is not the only one wondering what aminite (appetite) is; so am I, and plodding through phonetically rendered dialogue is so cumbersome a project that it sucks me right out of the story, making me think not about what is being said but rather wondering how it sounds. Capturing the nuances of syntax and diction is one thing, and if you’re a regional writer with a good ear, you can try it. But attempting to phonetically render dialect is a mistake, and often says more about you than about your characters. A better way to use language for characterization is to write in the first person, where the entire piece is basically the narrator’s voice. Compare the passage I quoted earlier from The Fan Man to the “Mistuh Butts” passage above; one is full of personality and humor, the other feels forced.

Dialogue has a much stronger role in character creation in poetry. The slick, choppy mantras of the pool players in Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” is a classic example. But you can also use setting and action to bring to life a person’s whole existence in just a few lines, as Martín Espada does in “Jorge the Church Janitor Finally Quits.” The truth is these methods do not necessarily take center stage as you are writing. When you’re writing, you’re writing. When you’re revising, however, and you know that something’s not quite right, someone’s lying there flat on the page and you can’t find the valve you can pump air into, it’s good to know where to look.